A lot of people get upset over CEO pay. The popular version of the “CEOs are paid to much” line focuses on the disparity between how CEOs are paid and how ordinary workers are paid. But that can be defended based on the size of a good CEO’s contribution to the company… if the CEOs are actually [Read More...]

[Content note: scrupulosity / possibly excessive levels of moral guilt. Passing references to a wide variety of bad things, such as rape, slavery, torture, and genocide.] Over the past weekend, I tried to force myself to write a long, soul-searching blog post that was going to have a title something like, “some depressing thoughts on [Read More...]

This is a post from one of Ozy’s old blogs, which I’m reposting from the Internet Archive’d version with permission: This is a pet hypothesis of mine, nothing more. There is absolutely no empirical data to back this up. But I think it explains my observations fairly well. One of the big things we talk [Read More...]

A lot of people who rely on online ads for revenue beg their users not to use services like Adblock, because it cuts into their revenue. However, I think it would be better for both myself and Patheos if all my regular readers used Adblock. Why? Well, first of all, I get most of my [Read More...]

Minor PSA (okay fine somewhat audacious request) for my friends in the effective altruism community: please get off Facebook. Or at least, try to move your effective altruism stuff off Facebook. Right now, the effective altruism community is my last excuse for using Facebook, but I don’t think this is really optimal, for a couple of [Read More...]

Update: After reading the comments on this post, particularly eric’s and Ben’s, I realized my sense this post is almost completely wrong. Turns out my sense of when a lot of things were invented was just slightly off in just the right way to make me underrate how much important stuff was invented in 1945-1980. Turns out [Read More...]

As of today, I’ve officially lived on the internet company peninsula for 11 months. And I just had a realization, about one thing I’ve learned in that time that very few people outside the area understand: a lot of what people call “technology” companies barely make any new technology. Concretely, if you went back in time to [Read More...]

Bryan Caplan, yesterday: I spent a lot of time conversing with conservative intellectuals this week. What surprised me most was their moral relativism. Sure, they spent a lot of time griping about left-wing relativism: The awful liberals refuse to admit the West is morally superior to Islamic and other non-Western cultures – or the United States [Read More...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about finance lately. In some cases, I’ve become convinced that the worst of what people say about finance is basically true. I think the 2008 financial crisis really was caused by outright fraud. But some of the complaints people make against Wall Street are deeply misguided. In [Read More...]